From Wednesday night’s Fox News All-Stars.

On President Obama’s release of his long-form birth certificate:

Our long national nightmare is over.
And we can thank Donald Trump who took us on this three-week, insane trip into a cul-de-sac. I love the way when he landed in New Hampshire this morning, he said, among other things, how very proud he was of himself for having done this. I wasn’t sure he could be any prouder of himself than he already was, but apparently he was.
Look, the president is right on this. We’ve been in three weeks where we actually had the presentation by at least the Republicans [though] Obama would claim himself [as well] — serious proposals on the major issue of our time, on the debt. Instead, it was spent — we were obsessed with the procedures of the Honolulu birth registrar 50 years ago.

On Ben Bernanke’s inaugural Federal Reserve news conference:

When you introduced the Jim Angle report on the press conference, you said … the Fed chairman had done something never done before. And I thought to myself: speak in English?
You know, the Fed is the ultimate Wizard of Oz institution, where it’s behind a screen … hidden and mysterious in its actions.
Bernanke’s predecessor, Alan Greenspan, was famed for his obfuscation in his speaking in Congress. His sentences you could not diagram nor explain. And he liked it that way.
Bernanke understands that cannot happen anymore, (a), because of the power of the Fed, and (b), because of the criticism in Congress and elsewhere about its actions and direction. The criticism is [of] the so-called QE2 [quantitative easing], which is [the] printing of money – [that it] is devaluing the dollar and creating inflation and a bubble in assets — stock market and commodities. And that’s going to be a disaster. … As a result, there’s a lot of pressure in Congress and elsewhere to rein in the power of the Fed to have oversight and control, which he doesn’t want.
That’s why he stepped out — not just to explain what he’s doing, but … as a way of showing that they want to be accountable or at least open. … He took questions on the issue that everybody is criticizing him about — the threat of inflation — and answered it in a reasonable way. His answer was: I know it’s out there, I know it’s a problem, a threat, but I can navigate, thread the needle here. …
I’m not sure he said anything new. It was a political event. He wanted to show he’s responsive and I think he succeeded in doing that.